Reading Narrative

Telling the story of your reading life can be compared to being asked to name your all-time favorite book.  All these titles and places and situations come rushing at you and sorting through them all can feel a little overwhelming.  But it is necessary to think about what makes you a reader.  Recognizing that your individual journey to reading has taken so many different approaches and directions makes you realize that becoming a lifelong reader was not something that just happened.  It was a complicated, multilayered process that has built on itself over time, and everyone reaches this destination in a different way.  Taking that moment to reflect on your own journey helps you better understand how anyone can be inspired, at any moment, into becoming a lifelong reader.

My Reading Narrative: The Mystical Library

I can’t tell you which came first; my love of books or love of libraries.  It would seem logical, you love to read books and then you discover the library to find more books to read.  But this is not necessarily how I remember it happening. 

There were always books in our house while I was growing up.  I received books on special occasions and always written on the inside cover was “To Xan Louise with Love”.  I enjoyed all the books I received but I was never really driven to find more to read.  Through my elementary and junior high years (calling middle school, junior high, probably dates me) I didn’t read Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys or any other popular children books.  Even the first couple of years of high school I still was not all that interested in reading for pleasure.  It wasn’t until I was required to read Silas Marner by George Eliot in one of my High School English classes that books became a hope of being something more than an afterthought.  While everyone else was moaning and complaining about reading this book, I was secretly enjoying it.  It was also right around this time that I started volunteering in my High School library. 

You must understand my High School library was the coolest room in my school.  In a building made of cinder blocks with no outside windows in any classrooms, the library stood out as the brightest room in the building.  It was round! And had windows covering half of the room!  Unfortunately the windows did not look outside but instead into the lunch room/common area but it felt like you had a view of the whole school and everything that was happening within it.  My jobs in the library were to shelve returns and also help with reading shelves.   Those hours in the library were the best.  Though, I did not get a lot of work done; I was constantly being reprimanded for reading the books instead of putting them away.  Yet I still was not “in love” with reading.  I was interested enough to open up many of the books I was supposed to be shelving, reading a few pages here, a few pages there but none of those books made it home with me.  I don’t recall a single title.

Maybe because I was surrounded by books everyday in the library, I was beginning to enjoy reading more and more. How could you not?  Then an absolutely wonderful thing happened, my Mom became a member of the Library Board for our small town library.  Along with her budgeting responsibilities she received a set of keys to the library.  Keys to the library, this is the magic part--being allowed in the library after hours.  I could wax poetically for hours about my small town library with its tall arched windows and its twelve foot wooden built-in shelves filled with books to read and the piece de resistance, the Librarian’s desk.  It was this huge curved behemoth of a desk with a slide away covering hiding all the library cards and hundreds of wondrously secret nooks and crannies.  After one visit after hours with my Mom, I was hooked.

I lived at the library.  I would beg my Mom for the keys because I had finished all my books and needed more immediately.  There was more than one occasion where Pearl, the Librarian, would turn off the lights and begin to lock up before realizing I was hidden away in a corner quietly reading.

Those library keys were the final step to unlocking my love of reading.  From that point on I tried my darndest to know every book on those shelves.  I read everything from Jane Austen to Elizabeth Peters and beyond.  And once I got started I have never slowed down.  I know from experience that those that say “I have always loved to read” are not the only ones allowed to find their way to the joys of reading.  Everyone has a shot at this discovery; it is my hope that I can hand the keys to the next passionate reader.